"Much the same as usual; he seemed rather bored."
Lady Cynthia had led her guest away from the fireside, where Gwendolen
Cairns was burbling to Asako.
Geoffrey could feel the searchlight of her judicial eye upon him, and a sensation like the pause when a great man enters a room. Something essential was going to invade the commonplace talk.
"Captain Barrington, your coming here just now is most providential.
Reggie Forsyth is not bored at all, far from it."
"I thought he would like the country," said Geoffrey guardedly.
"He doesn't like the country. Why should he? But he likes somebody in the country. Now do you understand?"
"Yes," agreed Geoffrey, "he showed me the photograph of a half
Japanese girl. He said that she was his inspiration for local colour."
"Exactly, and she's turning his brain yellow," snapped Lady Cynthia, forgetting, as everybody else did, including Geoffrey himself, that the same criticism might apply to Asako. However, Geoffrey was becoming more sensitive of late. He blushed a little and fidgeted, but he answered,—
"Reggie has always been easily inflammable."
"Oh, in England, perhaps, it's good for a boy's education; but out here, Captain Barrington, it is different. I have lived for a long time East of Suez; and I know the danger of these love episodes in countries where there is nothing else to do, nothing else to talk about. I am a gossip myself; so I know the harm gossip can do."